Jenna McLaughlin
Jenna McLaughlin is NPR's cybersecurity correspondent, focusing on the intersection of national security and technology.
McLaughlin, who joined NPR in September 2021, aims to tell the human stories behind the hackers — taking listeners beyond the technical details and diving into the reasons why technology's vulnerabilities and the people who exploit them matter to both the individual and the world.
Before joining NPR, McLaughlin covered national security, intelligence and technology for a range of publications, including Mother Jones Magazine, The Intercept, Foreign Policy Magazine, CNN and Yahoo News.
For example, in 2016, she uncovered startling details concerning a wave of former U.S. intelligence officials performing offensive cyber and other intelligence activities for the U.A.E. government, several of whom in 2021 brokered a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department. In 2018, McLaughlin was part of a team that exposed how a flaw in a CIA covert communication tool led to the imprisonment and death of CIA human sources in China and Iran.
In addition to serious national security stories, McLaughlin has interviewed high school debate teams on their views about privacy and surveillance in the wake of NSA contractor Edward Snowden's disclosures in 2013, toured the NSA's Hawaii outpost on the North Shore of Oahu beneath the pineapple fields, and sampled a meal made with Blackwater Beef, an attempt made by infamous military contractor Erik Prince to rebrand into the food industry in rural Virginia.
McLaughlin's work has earned her national recognition, including the Gerald R. Ford Award for Reporting on the National Defense in 2019 and a finalist nomination in 2020 for the University of Michigan's Livingston Awards honoring the best journalists under the age of 35.
Her reporting has taken her from Abu Dhabi to Estonia, and she hopes to regularly travel outside Washington in her role at NPR.
McLaughlin in based in Washington and has appeared as an analyst on MSNBC and CBSN, in addition to frequently moderating expert panels. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars Program, where she was a sea kayaking instructor and Wilderness First Responder.
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More than 5 million Ukrainians have fled their country since Russia invaded. Tens of thousands are in Estonia, where people remember what it was like to be occupied by the former Soviet Union.
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While Russia attacks Ukraine, Ukrainians are fighting back — not just with Molotov cocktails — but also with memes. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture leads an effort to win the information war.
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The outage impacted the website of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and the Armed Services as well as two large Ukrainian banks, Privatbank and Oschadbank.
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Whether Russia is serious about the effort is complicated. The Biden administration had pushed the Kremlin to take action against ransomware, which cost U.S. businesses billions in the last year.
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With Ukraine on the brink of war, a hacktivist group in nearby Belarus is getting attention for claims that it broke into the state-owned Belarussian Railways to try to stop Russian troops.
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In nearly eight hours of talks with U.S. officials, Russia says it's not planning to attack Ukraine, despite having an estimated 100,000 troops near the border. More talks are expected.
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One year ago, Russian hackers burrowed their way deep inside a network monitoring tool made by a company called SolarWinds. How much has changed in U.S. cybersecurity since then?
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One way or another, most phone calls these days involve the internet. Cybersecurity experts say that makes us vulnerable in ways we might not realize.
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The White House is hosting a virtual conference with countries from Ukraine to the United Arab Emirates to look for ways to fight ongoing ransomware attacks across borders.
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The White House is hosting a virtual meeting for more than 30 countries — from Ukraine to the United Arab Emirates — this week to find ways to fight ransomware together.